National Aphasia Awareness Month

By Stacey Anter

The Library Detective

June is National Aphasia Awareness Month and it brings up a frightening memory for me. Almost ten years ago, my husband and I experienced something that we thought couldn’t happen to us again.  After losing one best friend to an aneurysm a few years prior, we were close to losing another friend to a similar medical incident.  A close friend of ours, who has a congenital heart condition, and smokes, suffered a mini-stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA) that rendered him temporarily speechless, or aphasic. Luckily, we were with him at the time and we were able to get him to the emergency room immediately. We had gone out to eat and we were talking about music when we noticed that something wasn’t right.  Our friend is a musician and quite knowledgeable on the topic of discussion, but when he paused to think and was basically speechless, we knew something was wrong.  After bringing him to the ER, he seemed better and could speak again, but given his medical history, the doctor admitted him for further testing anyway.  Two days later, after MRIs, CAT scans, and several blood tests, it was determined that he had a blood clot that pressed against the speech part of the language center of his brain. His mother brought up a scary thought, “imagine if the aphasia never went away.” 

According to the National Aphasia Association, aphasia is “an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write.” It is caused by a brain injury usually from a stroke, but it can also be attributed to head trauma, brain tumors, or infections.  Our friend later explained that he knew what he wanted to say, but he just couldn’t articulate it; he felt like he was enclosed in a box and couldn’t get out.  Imagine living like that for the rest of your life.  Imagine having all your marbles, so to speak, but not being able to play with them.  I understand it is heartbreakingly frustrating to have a thought or idea to relay without a way in which to communicate it.  A simple game of charades gets frustrating when your gestures aren’t understood. Now, do that everyday, and see how angry and depressed you get.

On their website, the NAA writes that aphasia affects approximately one million people in the U.S., and that there are varieties and special features of aphasia.  People with global aphasia, which is the most severe, “can neither read nor write” and they can “produce few recognizable words and understand little or no spoken language.”  With Broca’s aphasia, “speech output is severely reduced and is limited to short utterances, of less than four words.” Mixed non-fluent aphasia is characterized by “sparse and effortful speech, resembling severe Broca’s aphasia.  However,….they remain limited in their comprehension of speech and do not read or write beyond an elementary level.”  Wernicke’s aphasia shows impairment in the comprehension of speech, but the production of fluent speech is not impaired.  Anomic aphasia is “applied to persons who are left with a persistent inability to supply the words for the very things they want to talk about –particularly the significant nouns and verbs.” 

The National Aphasia Association website http://www.aphasia.org provides many informative and helpful resources on aphasia for adults and children.   Books on aphasia for adults include: Coping with Stroke: Communication Breakdown of Brain Injured Adults  by H. Broida; Talking About Aphasia: Living With Loss of Language After Stroke by Sally Byng, Sue Gilpin, Chris Ireland, and Susie Parr; It’s on the Tip of My Tongue by Diane German, Ph.D.  The NAA also provides titles appropriate for children: Look Inside Your Brain by Heather Alexander, appropriate for ages 8 and up; Nana’s Stroke: A counseling storybook for children by Barbara Baird; and The Woman Who Lost Her Words: A Story of Stroke, Speech and Some Healing Pets by Julianne Labreche, CCC-SLP, appropriate for ages 8 and up.  Aphasia.org also has other personal accounts, newsletters, videos, DVDs, and other resources. 

The brain is the most amazing organ in the human body.  Mysteries of the brain remain unsolved regardless of continuing research. I once new an elderly deaf woman who, after suffering a terrible stroke that had affected the language center of her brain, could still communicate in sign language.  For people who suffer from aphasia, there is help and support.  What my friend’s mother said about what-ifs humbled my friend, and all of us. Needless to say, our friend has since had heart surgery and, for a while, was taking a blood thinner to prevent blood clotting.  And we are so very lucky and we’re glad that we were there to help him and get him to medical treatment at a moment’s notice. As a given, our friend can be quite a talker, and he’s the kind of person with an amazing sense of humor who can and does joke about the speechlessness. When we remember what happened, we joke that we knew something was wrong when he was literally speechless, because he never shuts up. But naturally, aphasia really isn’t a laughing matter.  What is also a given: He was extremely lucky. 

I call myself the Library Detective because I can find the answers to any question you can think of, or at least I can point you in the right direction.  To find out more about aphasia, visit your local library; there are more Library Detectives there, too.  If you would like to read other blog posts, come visit my Wordpress blog at http://librarydetective.wordpress.com/